Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
(The Distrowatch website ranks the popularity of distributions by using a wrong metric, the number of visits to each distribution's site. It does not measure downloads - but try telling the man who runs the site that he is wrong. Like many people in the FOSS community, he is always right.)
And so we come to Williamson's fallacious conclusion: "The danger is that this unfair competition ultimately drives out all the genuinely independent commercial Linux vendors, except Red Hat." Does he mean that someone of means should not use his or her own money to fund a company? Is he looking for that mythical "level playing field?" Is he expecting people in business not to use every legal advantage they have to get ahead? Gentleman, please grow up.
Any commercial distribution that cannot generate enough income will naturally cease to exist. The size of the distribution has little to do with this - Patrick Volkerding lives off Slackware , more or less a one-man team. But then many people tried to trade on names and reputations - as Debian founder Ian Murdock did with Progeny - and failed to gain sufficient traction.
Shuttleworth has enough money to keep going for another 10 years, if not more. And he is no fool - the company is registered in the Isle of Man, a well-known tax haven, and he ran a very successful company, Thawte, before he sold it.
He has started Ubuntu because he is from a poor country, South Africa, and wants to provide software at a decent price to that nation. The way Microsoft was taking African nations for a ride in terms of cost when providing software is, in part, what served to motivate him.
Williamson asks: "...what happens when Mr Shuttleworth’s money runs out, and Canonical/Ubuntu actually has to start making money somehow? I don’t think that question’s been answered yet." Ah, Adam, this is an open source project in case you forgot - someone else can always take the source and run with it if Shuttleworth leaves it orphaned.
The more the use of GNU/Linux spreads, the more need there will be for support people, developers, sysadmins, technicians and others with a knowledge of the operating system. That would benefit even people like Mr Sour Grapes Williamson.
David Bass
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